Psychological explanations for Schizophrenia

• Family dysfunction - Refers to processes within the family such as poor communication, cold parenting, and high levels of expressed emotion which can act as risk factors for development and maintenance of schiz.
• The schizophrogenic mother - From-Reichmann (1948) propsed a psychodynamic explanation for schiz based on patients childhoods. The distrust caused by high levels of tension and secrecy can develop into paranoid delusions and schiz.
• Double-blind theory - Bateson (1972) emphasaised the role of communication style in a family. Agreed that family climate is important in child-development. Developing child may feel trapped, fearing they may be doing things wrong and are unable to comment on unfairness. It is a risk factor in schiz.
• Expressed emotion - level of particularly negative emotion expressed toward individual with schiz by carers (often family members).
• Expressed emotion contains 3 elements - verbal criticism, hostility, emotional overinvolvement.
• Verbal criticism - of the individual, accompanied by violence.
• Hostility - towards person including anger and rejection.
• Emotional overinvolvement - in the life of the person including needless self-sacrafice.
• Expressed emotion is a serious source of stress for patients and can often primarily explain the relapse.
• Cognitive explanations - Dysfunctional thinking - Reduced thought processing in the ventral striatum is associated with negative symptoms, whilst reduced processing of information in the temporal and cingulate gyri is associated with hallucinations.
• Metarepresentation dysfunction - the inability to understand the meaning of one's own thoughts
• Central control dysfunction - the brain is unable to control the autonomic nervous system